Wednesday, 21 October 2015

Following on from my previous
post, this is the story of another ancestor with a connection to the engineering
work of Brunel.

My ancestor Jesse Flower* was
born in Timsbury, Somerset, the 7th of 8 children of Jesse Flower
and Elizabeth Shore. The younger Jesse
was baptised 5 November 1786 in the church at Timsbury. He was the second Jesse Flower born into the
family, his older brother, Jesse, died three years before he was born. While that might seem macabre to modern
sensibilities, sharing a name with an older deceased sibling was not unusual at
times in the past. Jesse Flower senior died in 1792, when son Jesse was only 3
years old.

In the late 1700s coal mining
started in the Timsbury area and the industry became a major employer. So Jesse Flower and at least one of his
brothers, Benjamin, became coal miners.
Jesse worked as a navigator, the person who dug the tunnels.

Jesse Flower married Mary Ann
Hoare in Timsbury on 18 May 1820. While
they were living in Timsbury, they had three daughters, my ancestor Catherine
Elizabeth Flower, Amelia and Harriet.

In 1825, work started on
Brunel’s tunnel under the Thames River in London, joining Rotherhithe and
Wapping. Brunel was from Bristol and he recruited miners from his home county
to help build the tunnel. Jesse Flower
was one of these miners. His grandson,
James Jesse Blake wrote of Jesse Flower’s work.

A new method of tunnelling
had been invented to build the tunnel, known as a tunnelling shield, which
allowed the construction of a tunnel in soft damp clay. I found a public domain picture of
illustrating the method on Wikipedia. At
this time, the Thames was little better than an open sewer. While building the tunnel, water seeped in
and caused illness among the workers. It
sounds like unpleasant work but then, so was work down the coal mines. Work on the tunnel continued on and off, with
disruptions due to floods, fires and leaks, until November 1841 when the tunnel
was completed.

Above ground, life was not
much better for Jesse Flower. He and his
young family lived in Southwark and then Rotherhithe. In 1827 and 1829, he had two daughters, both
Elizabeth, who did not survive infancy. Then
in 1832, his wife, Mary Ann, died.

Sadly, Jesse Flower did not
quite live to see the Thames Tunnel completed.
He died on 27 Aug 1841, only 55 years old, and was buried a few days
later at St Mary’s, Rotherhithe. His
death certificate says that he died of asthma, however I wonder if he was
suffering the effects of his years being exposed to coal dust and filthy Thames
water.

Other members of the Flower
family had migrated to London, so Jesse’s three young daughters would not have
been left to fend for themselves. All
three stayed in London and found husbands.

Next to the old tunnel entrance
in Rotherhithe sits the Brunel museum. I
have been on a guided tour to the musem that went down the tunnel shaft. The tunnel is now used by trains and can be
seen from platforms at Canada Water and Wapping London Overground stations. It is kind of cool to be able to see the
tunnel and to think that my ancestor helped build it.

*Flower or Flowers. I have used Flower here as it seems to be the
more common spelling.

Monday, 5 October 2015

Migrants are the hot topic of
the moment, so I thought I’d write about two of my ancestors who migrated from
Liverpool, England to Victoria, Australia.

I am a migrant. It took me two months to migrate from
Canberra to London but that was by choice and was an excellent adventure. I was fortunate to have a round-the-world
plane ticket and comfortable accommodation booked. I also had somewhere to stay when I arrived
and a passport that would let me stay.
Many others are not so lucky.

My two ancestors also took around
two months to travel between England and Australia, leaving Liverpool on 16
February 1861 and arriving in Melbourne 75 days later. They travelled on the most technologically
advanced ship that existed at the time, Brunel’s SS Great Britain. The SS Great Britain is now a very good
tourist attraction in Bristol (see photo) so it is possible to get a good idea
what life was like for migrants on the ship.
I visited the ship last year and learnt a lot.

SS Great Britain, in Bristol.

So who was on board the SS
Great Britain? My ancestor Sarah Pilling
nee Holden and her daughters Betsy (also my ancestor) and Sarah, aged 6 and 3
respectively. They were travelling to
join husband and father John Pilling who was already in Australia, having
departed England four years earlier, also on the SS Great Britain, probably
leaving behind a pregnant wife (I don’t know Sarah Pilling’s date of birth).The Pilling family came from
Haslingden, Lancashire, not far from Manchester. At that time, cotton mills were the main
industry in the area and the Pilling and Holden families worked in the mills,
mostly as weavers. Hours would have been
long and the work was hard. Like many in
that part of England, they were Baptists, non-conformists, which may have led
to some discrimination and disadvantage. So life in England was not easy for them.

John Pilling was a book keeper
and had gone to the goldfields in Victoria, perhaps to seek his fortune and a
better life for his family. I assume
things worked out for him as his wife and children eventually followed. I wonder if the long delay was due to the
family waiting until they felt the younger Sarah was old enough to travel. Whatever the reason, it seems to mirror what
still happens with migrants today with one family member migrating in the hope
of bringing the rest of the family along later.

First class cabin

Steerage cabin

Seeing the SS Great Britain
was an eye opener for me. While the
first class cabins looked reasonably comfortable although not luxurious by
modern standards (see photo), life for the steerage passengers didn’t look
quite so nice. I assume that Sarah and
her children travelled in steerage; there is no indication that the family were
well off. In steerage, Women and
children were accommodated in cabins whereas men were more likely to have been
in long dormitories (see photo). The cabins
(see photo) were tiny, with four narrow bunk beds. Some luggage would have been stored in a
trunk under the beds in the room, the rest in the hull. It is likely that Sarah and her two daughters
would have shared one bunk. The other
beds would be filled by strangers. It is
hard to imagine just how cramped and uncomfortable that would have been.

Steerage dormitory style accommodation

When not in the cabins,
steerage passengers had limited access to the deck and weren’t allowed near the
first class passengers.There was none
of the entertainment or facilities that are available on a modern cruise ship,
so passengers had to find ways to amuse themselves.According to the SS Great Britain exhibition,
drinking was rife so Sarah would have had to protect her daughters from
unsavoury behaviour.On the positive
side, all the teetotaller Baptists on board would have held religious meetings
and would generally have looked out for each other.

While this sounds like a
challenging journey, it was probably the most luxurious and easiest for any of
my ancestors who migrated from the United Kingdom to Australia in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Other ancestors experienced things like epidemic disease sweeping
through the vessel or ship wreck.Some
of my ancestors had no choice about migrating, being soldiers or convicts.As for the others, I think they must have
been very brave or very desperate to travel around the world in such conditions.I am grateful that I can now do the journey
in just under 24 hours in the relative comfort of a modern airplane.Notes on lineage: Me > Mum > John Macdonald Charley > Constance Mary Macdonald > Besty Pilling > Sarah Holden

About Me

I am an Aussie living in England. For a few years I have been writing as a hobby and thought it was time to share my writing more widely. I have a blog for fiction and a blog for stories from my family's history.